The invention is taught with reference to the transmission of alphanumeric codes to a client device such as a mobile telephone having a visible area adapted to display alphanumeric characters. The invention also teaches encoding, transmission, optical character recognition (OCR) techniques and data recovery techniques that are particularly adapted to read and interpret the alphanumeric codes that are displayed. It will be understood that the client device is not limited to mobile telephones. Similarly the invention is described as being useful in, but not limited to, ticketing applications.
According to estimates, the size of the mobile ticketing industry will reach US$40 billion by year 2009. There is clear market demand for mobile ticketing technology, across a diverse number of industries and applications, including aviation and transport, ticketing providers, sporting stadiums, movie theatre and entertainment venues, retailers, etc. Mobile ticketing will be able to dramatically reduce the cost of ticket fulfillment, and the cost of queues. As of September 2004, there are more than 1.7 billion mobile devices deployed globally. The amount of paper-based and plastic-based tickets, coupons and cards issued per annum are in the hundreds of billions.
There have been attempts by technology providers to deploy mobile ticketing solutions. Known solutions deploy a methodology of encoding information into a barcode graphic to be transmitted to a mobile device. Common barcode graphics can be either one-dimensional, i.e. the common vertical bars barcode, or two-dimensional. Unfortunately, these solutions are not device or carrier independent. Despite using open-standard protocols by the likes of Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to send these codes, the fact remains that different client devices simply don't treat the transmitted information equally when interpreting and displaying it.
These inconsistencies in graphical support have caused prior art wireless-borne ticket codes to (a) not arrive at the phones, (b) arrive but not be interpreted, or (c) be interpreted but not scannable. As the mobile devices become more sophisticated, the pixel size of the mobile phone screens decreases, making it practically impossible for a single barcode to be able to be sent to a group of new and old mobile devices and have it displayed consistently and reliably.
There are simpler solutions in the market, whereby information such as a ticket code is transmitted as plain text to the client device. It is then manually read by a person and entered into a keypad. However this process is potentially clumsy, time-consuming, costly, error-prone and not entirely secure.